Little Anodynes

Jon Pineda

Description

The third collection by the prize-winning Asian American poet Jon Pineda, Little Anodynes is a sequence of lyrical, personal narratives that continue Pineda's exploration of his biracial identity, the haunting loss of his sister, and the joys—and fears—of fatherhood. With its title inspired by Emily Dickinson, Little Anodynes offers its poems as "respites," as breaks in the reader's life that serve as opportunities for discovery and healing. Pineda deftly uses shortened lines and natural pauses to create momentum, which allows the poems to play out in a manner evocative of fine cinema, as if someone had left a projector running and these narratives were flickering and blending endlessly in an experience shared by the viewer, the storyteller, and the story itself.

Sujets

• Metraje
• América
• Whispering
• My Child
• His Family
• Shoe polish
• Footage
• Kundiman
• Pomade
• Dough
• Birthmark
• Asian American
• Lucky Charms
• Loss
• Parchment
• Poetry
• Porcelain
• Scrap
• American
• Grief
• Family
• Pastry
• Sadness
• Gelatin
• Emily Dickinson
• Death
• Clint Eastwood

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 31 mars 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611175264
• Langue: English

Extrait

Little Anodynes
T HE P ALMETTO P OETRY S ERIES N IKKY F INNEY , S ERIES E DITOR K WAME D AWES , F OUNDING E DITOR
Ota Benga under My Mother s Roof Carrie Allen McCray, edited by Kevin Simmonds
A Book of Exquisite Disasters Charlene Monahan Spearen
Seeking: Poetry and Prose Inspired by the Art of Jonathan Green Edited by Kwame Dawes and Marjory Wentworth
New and Selected Poems Marjory Wentworth
Little Anodynes: Poems Jon Pineda
Little Anodynes
POEMS
Jon Pineda
Foreword by Oliver de la Paz

The University of South Carolina Press
2015 Jon Pineda
Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-525-7 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-61117-526-4 (ebook)
Cover illustration: Ascensions I , 2007 by Edward del Rosario
For my family
The heart asks pleasure first, And then excuse from pain; And then, those little anodynes That deaden suffering

Emily Dickinson
Contents
Foreword
Oliver de la Paz
One
First Concert
Prayer
Notes for a Memoir
Strawberries
Ceiling Ground
Collectors
Silence
Two
The Ocean
Sealed Letter
There Is an Edge to Each Image
Distance
Ellipses
My Place
Three
We Left the Camera
Ritual
Edenton
The Story
It Is Simple
Spectators
Kundiman
Trailer
Umpteenth
Arrival
Four
Little Anodynes
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Over the past ten years, Jon Pineda has been writing poems of aching grace. Intimately he draws the reader into the embrace of his language, at once quiet and tender, then suddenly surging with the arresting violence of a childhood marred by intolerance, loneliness, and regret. I use the term embrace because the idea persists that touch, either tender or terrible, is a means toward human understanding. Memory and the pain of loss are at the core of his poetic dilemmas, starting with Birthmark and continuing with The Translator s Diary. In each of those earlier works, Pineda attempted to reconcile the death of his sister, the tyranny of coming-of-age, and the responsibility of fatherhood. Through it all Pineda clearly works within the most difficult of mediums-the complex and distinctly individualized space of human suffering. In his poetic endeavor to bridge the differences between us, the past collapses into moments of wisdom and understanding, consoling us through their beauty.
The poems in his latest collection, Little Anodynes , are a continuation of Jon Pineda s generous, meditative, and immediate genius. Like the title of the book, derived from Emily Dickinson s Poem 536, the poems within bring us salves for our suffering. The poems are written in breathless ribbons of prose verse, where moments from youth collapse into epiphanies fired from the synapses. In the first poem of the book, First Concert, the speaker describes the experience of attending his first concert, declaring: